Swarm intelligence in a race

Or unintelligence? Not sure.

A friend recently posted on Facebook a video of starling murmurations over a river in Ireland. In these murmurations, thousands of starlings fly in uncanny coordination, relying on their neighbors for information to avoid collisions; basically, if your neighbor moves, so do you. What's so interesting is that this patterned movement is best described by equations of "critical transitions." (Who knew The Birds of Hitchcock were just going through phase transitions!) "Critical" in the case of starlings means "always ready to optimally respond to an external perturbation, such as predator attack." And, survival seems to be the main reason for these beautiful murmurations, as shown by one 2011 study in which scientists followed a peregrine falcon chasing a murmuration. "Most of nature's beauty has to do with one of two things: sex and being eaten alive." Another study (2013) showed that the benefits of this kind of "swarming" behavior to animal prey (i.e., causing predator confusion) is sufficient for the behavior's evolution. There is also the related, decades-long work of Thomas Seeley (Cornell University) on swarm intelligence of honey bee colonies. A basic finding of Seeley is that, even though an individual bee in a swarm has limited information and intelligence, the swarm as a whole is far smarter (crowdsourcing!).

All this got me wondering--naturally--about how swarm movement and swarm intelligence might be connected to running. (There is always a connection, right? After all, running is the perfect metaphor for life--or, is it the other way around?) An imperfect connection might be to a group of hunters practicing persistence hunting. The latter has been hypothesized, in the running man or endurance running theory of human evolution, as being critical to the survival of early humans. A closer connection might be to a field of runners (the "swarm") in a race. Throughout a race, but particularly at (1) the start, where runners are discarding clothing, adjusting paces, smiling at cameras, and generally sorting themselves out and (2) each water/food stop, where there is--if one were to actually analyze it--quite a complicated set of decisions being made by runners and volunteers in their various interactions (runner-runner, runner-volunteer, and volunteer-volunteer), individual runners are making decisions--sometimes smart, sometimes not--and acting on them, based on limited local information (e.g., other runners nearby, an upcoming turn). But, what about the swarm of runners as a whole? Is it smarter than any individual runner? I'm not sure. Given situations like the course congestion in the 2013 Marine Corps Marathon (e.g., in the new out-and-back section along Rock Creek Parkway), maybe swarm unintelligence is more the reality! Still, a better understanding of running swarms in races could provide better guidance for a runner in negotiating the start of a race, the water/food stops, and other crowded sections.